In 1957, the National Academy of Sciences of the United States recommended long term burial as the best solution for permanent disposal of nuclear wastes. Starting in 1978, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has been studying Yucca Mountain in Nevada as a possible site for the first long term geological repository for U.S. The U.S. Congress passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act in 1982 which gave the DOE the responsibility for locating a site, building an underground repository for nuclear waste and operating the site on an ongoing basis. In 1984, the DOE selected ten sites in six states as possible locations for a repository.
After the report on the sites was delivered in 1985, President Reagan selected three sites from the ten studied to go through an intensive review known as site characterization. Yucca Mountain was one of the three sites selected by Reagan. Congress amended the Nuclear Waste Policy Act in 1987 to focus exclusively on Yucca Mountain. The DOE contracted with utilities to begin accepting spent nuclear fuels at the Yucca Mountain Repository.
In 2002, the United States Congress finally approved the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository as a long term repository for spent nuclear fuel and other high-level radioactive wastes. In 2006, the DOE suggested if the project was fully funded that the Yucca Mountain repository could be opened and accepting nuclear waste by 2017.
The plan called for forty miles of tunnels under Yucca Mountain which could be used to store a maximum of 77,000 metric tons of waste, include up to a maximum of 63,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel. Current estimates are that U.S. reactors will have produced that amount of spent fuel by 2014.
Since the 1987 decision to drop two other proposed sites, the Yucca Mountain Project has been fiercely opposed by critics including two thirds of the people who live in Nevada. There have been protests, complains, laws suits, opposition by elected officials as the debate raged. The studies of possible ground water infiltration at the site were challenged and ultimately validated. Studies indicated that the cost of not moving forward with the repository would be very high.
Democratic Nevada Senator Harry Reid became the Senate Majority leader in the 2006 mid-term elections when the Democratic Party took control of the Senate. He had been a long term opponent of locating a nuclear repository in his state and he used the resources of his new position to fight against it. The 2008 budget cut the Yucca Mountain repository budget to around four hundred million but the project managers did their best to rearrange their budget to continue work.
In the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama said that he would cancel the Yucca Mountain project. After he was elected, he was told by the Nuclear Regulatory Agency that the president did not have the authority to cancel the project. But in 2010, President Obama and Energy Secretary Chu did managed to cancel the Yucca Mountain Repository project.
At this time, the U.S. has no long term storage for spent nuclear fuel. Spent fuel is being stored at reactor facilities in temporary water pools or dry cask storage. It is estimated that the temporary storage facilities at U.S. reactors will be full within 5 years. This is a critical problem facing the nuclear power industry in the U.S.
NRC Yucca Mountain Project diagram:
- Canisters of waste, sealed in special casks, are shipped to the site by truck or train.
- Shipping casks are removed, and the inner tube with the waste is placed in a steel, multilayered storage container.
- An automated system sends storage containers underground to the tunnels.
- Containers are stored along the tunnels, on their side.